The Between (31 page)

where you goin’, mrs. kelly?

you get back here, boy do you hear me?

Listening to C.J., Hilton was almost convinced he could taste the traces of the bitter salt water that had filled his mouth that day. He felt disquieted, as he had felt listening to Andres Puerta at the cafe with the ocean mocking behind him.

C.J. went on, his gray eyebrows furrowed. “I used to swim in school, so I was the closest behind her. Must have been five, six men in the water. Yeah, it was six, because Matt Coombs was there and had no business there because he could hardly walk up a flight of steps. Somebody had to pull him out of that undertow, too.”

“What about Nana?” Hilton asked, edging forward in his chair.

“I was swimming right up behind your Grandma Kelly, and suddenly I could see you, Hilton. You weren’t anything but a brown spot beneath the water—good thing the sun was bright that day, and the water was clear. She was right up on you too, dove down like a fish and brought you back up again before I could get within five feet of her.

“I’ll never forget the look on her face: she was past tired, so tired she looked like it hurt. That Indian hair of hers was wet and stringy, all wrapped around her face. But to look at her mouth, you could see nothing but contentment. I can’t fix exactly how to put it right, like she was saying, ‘There. That’s done.’ Like it was the answer to everything.”

  nana?

nana won’t leave you, hilton. go back now.

it’s not time for vou yet

As C.J. described Nana’s face, Hilton was sure he could see it, blurred through the water that stung his eyes mercilessly when Nana’s strong arms lifted him back into the air. He could almost remember hearing shouts all around him. He could almost remember talking to Nana. Had he talked to her? What had she said? Hilton sat rigid as C.J. continued.

“Now, I could feel that current stirring when she handed you over to me—and you were heavy, boy—but before I could open my mouth to warn her, she was gone. Somebody said they saw her head sink below the water, as serene as could be, but I was close enough to touch her and I never saw a thing. Not a damn thing. Somebody started yelling about the undertow then—I think it was Matt Coombs, if I remember right—and we all had to swim like hell to get clear. That current was something else that day.”

“He still won’t go to the beach,” Auntie said.

“Damn right. Me or anyone else who was there, just ask them. Matt’s dead now, but when I see your Uncle Rick or Lucius to this day, all I have to say is, ‘You remember that day at Virginia Key?’ And they all groan like they’re still fighting it. Grown men.” His expression grew distant, and he turned his eyes back to Hilton, looking pensive. “This is going to sound funny, but it’s like it wanted you, boy. The water wanted you. That’s the only way I can put it. It was like we were fighting all of nature to bring you back.”

Hilton blinked rapidly and cleared his throat. He’d heard enough, he decided. “That’s something else . . .” he muttered, ready to change the subject.

“More like a miracle,” Auntie said.

C.J. shook his head. “And it’s a good thing Lucius got his medic training in Korea,” he said.

“How so?” Hilton asked.

“He’s the one who got you breathing again.”

go
back, hilton

At once, Hilton’s lungs felt empty. No sound came from his mouth when he tried to speak at first, so he had to breathe deeply to form his words. “What do you mean?”

Auntie began to fret. “Well, we didn’t think we ought to . . .”

“Guess we never told you about that part,” C.J. said mat-ter-of-factly. “When I laid you down on the beach, Lucius leaned over your chest and said you weren’t breathing. No heartbeat, either. Lord, you should have seen our faces fall. We were still in a fit over losing your Grandma Kelly in the water, but nobody expected to lose the little boy.”

a tiny coffin like that

you never know what the boy could’a been, could’a done
go back, hilton

“A miracle, like I said,” Auntie sighed, shaking her head.

“But Lucius knew what to do. He sat you up and pumped the water out, breathed some air into you, and the next thing we knew you were coughing and coughing, asking for your grandma. ‘Don’t leave me here, Nana,’ you said.”

“Broke our hearts.”

“We decided right then and there you’d be coming home with us. We didn’t even talk it over. And with our boy grown and off to college, neither of us ever thought we’d ever have another child in the house. We just—”

“We just knew,” Auntie finished, smiling at Hilton. “We knew there was a plan for you.”

To keep the peace with Dede, Hilton dutifully showed up for his appointments with Raul and met with Laura Ming, a Chinese-American doctor Raul was bent on sending him to. But as he met with them with his legs crossed, answering their questions about his moods and thoughts in a cooperative drone, his mind was unanchored.

He no longer looked forward to seeing Raul the way he had before, and he rarely joked with him now. Raul had been right; he couldn’t be his therapist as well as his friend. Raul, as a trained healer determined to find a treatment, had lost his blithe edge with Hilton. The idea of asking Raul to schedule a Heat game with him seemed out of the question, out of line. Hilton always left Raul’s office feeling empty and dissatisfied. And sad.

“So we can expect to see you Monday, the thirteenth?” Raul asked at the close of their third meeting Friday, as Hilton stood to find the door. Hilton’s eyes had rarely left his watch, which had passed the hour into languid increments.

“Fine,” Hilton said, sighing.

“Is something wrong?”

Hilton shook his head. What could he say? That the treatment was useless? That he’d decided his condition, even the whispers of voices he’d occasionally begun to hear just within his consciousness, had nothing to do with schizophrenia?

“It gets better, Hilton. It takes time,” Raul said.

Hilton nodded and waved a silent good-bye to Raul, closing the door behind him. But once he was in the reception area and he saw his car parked at the meter through the glass doors, he paused. That wasn’t a proper way to say good-bye.

Hilton knocked twice and opened the door again, finding Raul finishing his notes. “Back for more?”

Hilton realized he didn’t know what he had come back to say. In his discomfort, he had to force himself to keep his eyes focused on Raul instead of glancing purposelessly around his office. “I just . . . uh . . .” He wanted to hug his friend. He fumbled, then shrugged. “I just wanted to say thanks.”

Raul rested his pen, puzzled at first, then he smiled. “Not necessary. You’d do the same for me.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Hilton joked, although he felt anything but jovial. Again, an interminable pause. “Okay. Well. I’ll see you on Monday.”

“And by the way, Hilton,” Raul said as Hilton turned tp leave. “Isn’t Sunday the big day?
Feliz cumpleanos.”

The phrase sounded familiar. “What does that mean?”

“Happy birthday.”

Hilton stared back at Raul over his shoulder. The words barely registered, as though Raul had uttered them in a different language again. He hadn’t forgotten about his birthday, not with Kaya and Jamil so excited about the supposedly surprise family dinner they were planning, along with gifts and a skit show. Yet the wish from Raul’s lips sounded ironic. Why was the day’s approach something he should be happy about?

“We’re getting old, my friend,” Raul went on.

Again, a joke emerged from habit. “Speak for yourself, man.”

Instead of driving home, Hilton tooled north on Biscayne Boulevard until he reached the gates to Poinciana Haven, where he could see the mobile home Charles Ray Goode had left behind with a
FOR SALE
sign in the window. He’d left his curtains hanging inside, but that was about all, Hilton saw when he stood on a cement block to peer between them. He halfway expected to find Charles Ray still standing there, staring back at him.

But no. Just a tabletop piled with fast food wrappers, and empty cabinets hanging open. He was really gone, just as Curt had verified through the FBI and his new probation officer upstate. For now, they were making him check in daily. That simple.

Hilton made it back to Coral Gables just in time to pick up Kaya and Jamil from their schools. In another couple of weeks, the family had decided, Kaya and Jamil would be allowed to take the bus or ride home with friends the way they had before Goode entered their lives. For now, while Hilton was on leave, he enjoyed picking them up—not as a safety measure, but just to do it. Parked in front of their schools, he felt buoyant each time the crowd of children cleared and he saw his own bounding up to the car with breathless stories or complaints from the school day.

Kaya didn’t like her algebra teacher. Jamil was sick of the bully bothering him at lunch, picking at his food.

“He plays too much. I could beat him up,” Jamil said.

“Don’t let me catch you fighting,” Hilton warned.

Jamil sighed. “But it’s his fault. He’s the one who starts it. If he won’t leave me alone and I hit him, why should I get in trouble? That’s not fair.”

“You’re not supposed to fight. Period. A lot of people think black children are aggressive, so you have to be smarter than that. Eyes are always watching you, Jamil. Remember that.”

His son had lost the argument with Kaya over who would sit up front, so Hilton glanced at Jamil’s dubious face in the rearview mirror. How many black boys Jamil’s age would one day end up staring down the barrel of a police officer’s gun because of a quick assumption, or fear? That could happen to his hotheaded son, if he wasn’t careful. That could happen soon.

“You got that? Promise me you’ll remember that, okay?”

“Ill remember.”

“I said to promise.”

“Cross my heart, Daddy,” Jamil said. “Hope to die.”

The reading light was on in Kaya’s room, so Hilton knocked on her door, which was ajar. Since it was nearly midnight, Kaya was already in bed beneath her sheets, but she was enthralled in a teen paperback picturing two laughing blond girls on the cover. She barely glanced up at Hilton as her eyes devoured the words.

“Why are you up so late?” he asked her, sitting cross-legged on her carpeted floor.

“I just want to finish this chapter,” she said.

He hadn’t had a chance to really talk to Kaya since he’d been back. He’d found himself wanting to apologize about the scene when he left the house, but she had never stopped her cheerful chatter long enough to give him a chance. They’d danced around each other for days, occasionally catching the other in thoughtful gazes, but they hadn’t sat down to share their feelings. And it didn’t look like she planned to give him an opportunity tonight, either.

Kaya had big, pretty brown eyes like her mother’s. Long lashes. She was wearing a bright pink nightshirt, which framed her face perfectly, softly. Her hair was tied behind her head in a ponytail, so she looked older to him than she usually did with her braids on either side. She might not look much different as a young woman in her twenties, her thirties. She would be taller, but she wouldn’t look very different at all.

Kaya’s eyes gazed up at him from behind the book. She smiled. “What are you looking at?”

“You, that’s all. My little girl.”

“Please don’t start that, Dad.”

Hilton saw a gleam of silver on Kaya’s nightstand beneath her brass banker’s light, so he reached up to touch it. It was a pin, a winged staff with twin serpents entwined around it. The medical insignia.

“Where’d you get this?”

Kaya sat up in her bed, closing the book. “Oh, my science teacher gave me that. He said I’m so advanced, I could be in a tenth-grade science class. I told him I’m going to be a doctor. That’s a pin from a real doctor. It’s his son’s.”

Hilton studied the tiny pin in his palm. Mr. Bonetti. He remembered the man from the parent-teacher conferences last fall. He was a good man, kind and smart. He was the sort of man Kaya could keep in touch with for advice and encouragement for years even after she left middle school. Maybe.

“I told him about my dream that time,” Kaya said suddenly.

“Which dream?”

“You know the one. I told him I met a girl who died of AIDS and I dreamed about her. And how she said I’m going to do something with T cells.”

“What did he say?”

“He just laughed,” Kaya said, shrugging. “He said he doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

They both fell silent, and Hilton became aware of the silence all throughout the house. He realized that he and Kaya both believed in ghosts, at least for tonight. Hilton closed his fingers tightly around the pin.

“You can keep that if you want to,” Kaya said. “Then you can give it back to me when I finish medical school.”

“That’s a bargain,” Hilton said softly, stroking her head. Hilton could see the corners of Kaya’s mouth drooping with adult worries that had been absent in her face six months ago. She stared at the floor, biting her lip. It was time to talk, at last. “How long will you be here, Dad?”

“A long time, I hope.”

“Is that crazy guy really gone?”

“As far as I know. I think so. Why?”

Kaya shook her head, silent. Then she sighed and met Hilton’s eyes. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel like he’s really gone. I feel like everything is going to be different from now on.”

“Everything will be different, for a while,” Hilton said.

“Nothing will be like it was before, will it?” Kaya asked stubbornly, looking unhappy. “It won’t be like before.”

Hilton paused to think. He knew she was right. Nothing would ever again be exactly the same for the James family. Some of it was lost forever, like Kaya’s baby teeth and his own peaceful nights. But he felt an overpowering sense that what lay ahead for Kaya, just possibly, was too wonderful for him to even imagine.

He took his daughter’s hand. “That’s the whole trouble with this world,” he said. “Everything always becomes different, in the end. But different doesn’t mean bad, just different. You know?”